Data and Reporting

New! PYMNTS Developer Tracker™ - November 2015

Payments go virtual

The November edition of the PYMNTS Developer Tracker™ is out, bringing the total number of developers profiled to 50. Each month the Tracker scours the commerce and payments ecosystem looking at how developers are shaping efforts. Across the three key categories tracked—Shopping and Payments, Operations and Marketing—this month’s Tracker looks at how social communities, including Facebook and Pinterest, are moving on the commerce enablement front, then at fraud and tokenization developments, and on to how one fashion label is introducing virtual reality on the runway.

Speaking of virtual reality—it’s what’s hot in this month’s Tracker. PYMNTS catches up with Matt Ozvat, vice president of developer integrations at Vantiv, to talk about the big impact made by Bobby Boyd and the team at PayVR at a recent Vantiv-sponsored hackathon. During the Vantiv experience at Money 2020, the PayVR developer team took virtual reality to a whole new level by integrating Vantiv’s payments API to create an immersive 3-D shopping mall where shoppers discover, buy and pay for items as they would in a real-world in-store experience—made even easier with hand gestures and head nods. The PayVR experience connects a point-of-sale system and a virtual reality eCommerce site to complete payment and order transaction.

“The big thing in developing for VR is to achieve what’s called ‘presence’, this feeling that you’re really there in that virtual world,” Bobby Boyd said in an interview with PYMNTS.com. “That can be shattered pretty quickly if you have to take off the headset and fish around in your wallet to grab a credit card.”

The full conversation is available in this month’s Developer Tracker. Ask us for a copy or grab it over at PYMNTS.com.